


you can hear it in the silence

by antithestral



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antithestral/pseuds/antithestral
Summary: [ABANDONED]When Bruce is injured in action, Clark starts tracking his heartbeat obsessively, all the way to the ER, and through the operation, and in post-op... and when Bruce returns to the Manor... and throughout his physical rehabilitation... after he's fully recovered...Which is when Clark realizes — he might have a small problem.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 17
Kudos: 98





	you can hear it in the silence

**Author's Note:**

> This work is incomplete, and unlikely to be finished.

"Talk to me," Dr. Thompkins said sharply, as Clark lowered Bruce into the anti-gray medbay pod. His hands were slick with blood. Bruce's blood. 

Christ, he was so pale...

"Clark," Dr. Thompkins said again, her voice like a blade. "Report."

"Knife, between the third and fourth rib. Collapsed lung. He's hemorrhaging internally." They entered into the medbay, Clark's hand tight around Bruce's ribs, enough pressure to keep the wound closed, for all the good it did. 

"Four liters of O-neg," Dr. Thompkins was saying to one of her ER nurses. The Hall of Justice had a completely fitted trauma center. "Get the operating room ready." Clark tore the Batsuit open, except for the patch around the wound, electricity raining over his skin when Bruce's traps were activated. His mouth was slack, his eyes rolled back. He looked... dead.

"Sinus rhythm faint but present. We need to get him on the table now. Clark. Clark." Clark turned to look at her. Bruce looked dead. Bruce looked... dead. His head was filled with the harsh, continuous whine of buzzsaws—over it, Dr. Thompkins' voice sounded irrelevant. Far away. "You need to move your hand. We need to get him to the OR."

Clark stared at his hand. Blood spurted weakly between his fingers. His whole palm was wet and warm and slick, and Bruce's pulse was a faint, butterfly beat, thrumming and fragile. His lips felt numb.

"Clark," Dr. Thompkins said, and her hand touched his shoulder. "Let go. We'll take care of him. You need to let go."

"I..." He stared at his own hand. It wasn't moving. Why wasn't it... "I need to keep pressure on it. He told me to—It was the last thing he told me to do. Keep pressure on the wound."

"And you did good. Listen. Can you hear his pulse? Listen." Clark listened. His hand was shaking. "Now let go." 

And he did.

* * *

"Wow," Lois mumbled the next day, when she saw him, wheeling her carry-on behind her into the Planet's bullpen at two in the afternoon. There was an ICN tag on the handle—Incheon International, Seoul, South Korea. There was a double-stacked thermal cup in her hand that reeked of a too strong cappuccino. "You look like shit, Smallville, who died."

Clark tensed, badly, visibly, and Lois stilled. "Clark," she said, quietly. "I—Oh shit. The—thing. Yesterday. I—I was stuck at the airport hotel, I didn't. Fuck. Is—Did something go wrong?"

"It's—Bruce."

Her eyes were wide. "Oh god. Is he—He's alright, right? Clark?"

But Clark was a million miles away already, seeking out that quiet, steady heartbeat, with a kind of desperation that didn't bear thinking about. 

And—there. 

"He's okay," Clark said. He was gripping his knees, bowed over in his chair like an old man, the thud-thud-thud of his own heart vulgar in his ears. "He's okay," Clark repeated, and closed his eyes. Lois was standing in front of him, and Clark let his head fall forward, let her stroke his hair, feather-light and sure. "He's stable, they've stitched him up, he's just... on a lot of pain meds. I don't know when he'll wake up. I don't know if—If he'll—"

"He'll wake up," Lois whispers, sub-vocalizing so her words are only for him.

"How can you be so—How do you know?"

"Because you're watching over him."

* * *

It's gone past midnight when Clark hears it, the hitch in his heartbeat, the faint acceleration—it jolts him out of his sleep. In an instant, Clark is awake, alert, out of the window, crashing past the sound barrier somewhere over Metropolis and landing at the Hall with the sonic boom of a transatlantic Boeing jetliner from the early 1990s.

He's outside Bruce's recovery ward in the space of a breath, the nurses twitching a little in surprise when he arrives.

"Superman?" he hears someone ask cautiously. "Is everything alright?"

"He's—" Clark's eyes are focused on the door. "He's awake."

"Oh, alright then." A beat. "You can go on in, if you like."

Clark turns to the nurse then finally, sees warm eyes watching him with a faint, odd smile. 'James,' the name tag reads. 

"It's—Shouldn't—I mean, doesn't Dr. Thompkins need to look him over first?"

"Nah. He's in the clear now. You go on in. I'll be around to update his charts in a while. Alright?" He says all of this very slowly, very gently, as if speaking something wild and wounded, trying not to let it get spooked. Clark wonders what he looks like, to make the nurse sound like that. 

"Alright," he says. His throat feels raw, but he walks up to the door anyway, pushes it open. 

Bruce turns, blinks blearily, once, twice.

"Clark," he says, in a voice like steel wool, and Clark's heart thumps a startled, extra beat. "Don't tell me you've been sitting out there the whole time."

 _'No,'_ Clark thinks about telling him. _'No, I was in Metropolis, I was at home, in bed, asleep. And then your heartbeat tripped and I lost my fuckng head and all I could think about was being here, being in this room.'_

So he smiles, and shrugs sheepishly, and sits down on the edge of Bruce's bed. "Alright," he says, smiling faintly. "I won't tell you."

Bruce rolls his eyes, huffs an impatient breath. "I don't need a nanny, Clark," he grumbles, shifting slightly to the side all the same, so Clark can prop himself up against the headboard. The bed was slightly larger than a queen, the mattress plush, the sheets luxuriant. Clark propped one knee up, extended the other leg out. 

"I know." His thigh brushed Bruce's shoulder. "But I could do with some company. You don't mind, do you?"

Bruce didn't reply, and Clark looked down. 

Asleep. He was already asleep.

Clark almost smiled.

 _You're okay._ There was a tightness in his chest, and a stinging in his eyes. _You're okay._ The words sounded like a prayer. _You're okay._

Clark couldn't stop listening to his heartbeat.

* * *

So he didn't.

That was the way it was, and fighting against it seemed like an exercise in futility. Bruce would hate it, if he knew what Clark was up to, but Bruce didn't have to know—didn't have to be privy to this new, embarrassing weakness Clark couldn't shake off.

It was difficult, at first, honing in on the sound—not his words, not the people around him, nothing but the steady thudding of his heart.

But once he'd managed the task, it was equally impossible to turn off, and so Clark grew used to it, the awareness of Bruce's heartbeat syncopating in the back of his mind. 

And that was—that was fine, then. Just one more thing in the strange and unsettling adventures of Kal-El, space refugee, and Clark filed it away, put a box around it, and tucked it onto a shelf in his mind—the fact of Bruce's heartbeat did not need to affect his life, so he wouldn't let it. It could be that simple. It could.

Until it wasn't.

Clark was in the middle of a draft article about the teachers' union strike, when it happened, at seven PM on a Monday evening, in Metropolis.

(thud-thud-thud)

Clark jolted in his seat, like someone had jammed a shard of kryptonite between his ribs, flinching hard enough to push his chair back a half-inch with a sharp, angry squeak of wheels, the R key popping off his keyboard and skittering down below his desk.

"Clark?" Lois asked, peeking at him from over their shared cubicle wall. 

(a faint gasp, a second heartbeat, tripping into lightspeed)

"Hey, Smallville. You're a million miles away, huh?" 

"I have to—I have to go."

He made it to the stairwell on unsteady feet, barely hearing Lois' reply, and then it was barely any effort at all, to change into his uniform, exit from the rooftop and blur down to Gotham.

(a soft, pained cry, a woman, it was a woman, and 'please, please, oh—' and bruce's heartbeat, thudding hard)

Seven in the evening in Metropolis was eleven at night in Gotham. Early for patrol, but not by much.

He followed the sound but it didn't lead him to Gotham's alleyways the way he expected, the Bat out in full force, and Clark... slowed down.

('oh god,' that voice was saying, and bruce heart was thud-thud-thudding in his ears, 'yes, yes, fuck—')

He coasted to a stop in the cloud cover high above Wayne Tower. Bruce had a penthouse there, an enormous skylight in the master bedroom that meant Clark didn't even have to switch his vision, just had to... _look_.

She was stunning, of course, red-haired and leggy, with that rail-thin figure that said model, or maybe socialite. Bruce's head was a dark smudge between her thighs, her fingers digging into his shoulders, clutching at his scalp, and Clark could— could hear Bruce, not just his heart but the soft, wet sounds of his mouth eating out her cunt. It took nothing, the slightest extension of his senses, before he could... taste it on his tongue, sweat and musk, the slightest shift in vision, to see Bruce, his cock hard and leaking, grinding his hips against the mattress while he licked her hungrily. Her cries were hoarser now, her whole body taut and shaking, her nipples tight and red, wet with saliva, and Clark was—trembling. 

He should look away. He needed to look away. He needed to _leave_.

Bruce pulled away from her, just as she was about to come.

"Oh screw you, you bastard—oh god, Bruce, don't stop—"

"Or I could fuck you," Bruce murmured, dark, silken, his voice dripping with sex, and the sound of it went straight to Clark's groin, heat tugging harsh and insistent, cock filling up with blood.

"Yeah," she was saying, "yeah, okay, baby, come on," and he was flipping them over, letting her straddle his hips, and now Clark could see him, could see that thick, beautiful cock, wet with precome, and could see her sinking down on him, slow, slow, you had to go slow with a cock like that, that big and— _oh god,_ she was whimpering, _oh god, Bruce, fuck me fuck me—_

Clark balled his hands into fists and jolted upwards, just late enough to see Bruce's hands come around her hips, and fuck up into her wet, sopping cunt, hear the crashing beat of his heart, and the sound of her cry as she came.

* * *

So that was the story of how one time, Clark accidentally watched his best friend have sex.

It wasn’t the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him: Clark had been turned into a cat, had travelled to alternate dimensions, had once accidentally clicked on a spam link for Red Tornado-themed porn. Really, considering Bruce Wayne’s social life, it was more surprising it hadn’t happened _before_.

And now, you know, now that Clark knew what to look out for, knew the warning signs between adrenaline and arousal, he could just… turn his hearing down a notch when Bruce had female company. It was fine. It was totally fine. Bruce didn’t have to know. Bruce would never—

Oh, who was he kidding.

Of course Bruce was going to find out. 

Clark turned red every time he even _thought_ about looking Bruce in the eye, and pretending he didn’t know how the man sounded the moment when he came. Pretending he didn’t know the exact way his skin would taste, the throb of his cock, the faint tremors running down those powerful thighs…

Here was the heart of the problem: Clark knew exactly how Bruce’s heartbeat sounded was he was hard, when he was aroused, and he could turn it off, now, could force his senses to somewhere else, to the sound of the waves lapping the shore on a deserted island off the Indian coast, to the thump of a bassline in an illegal club in Lebanon, to the sound of a girl singing to herself in a tiny garden flat in Brooklyn. 

He could do that. 

But it was the knowledge of it, that under a shower in Gotham, a hundred-odd miles away, Bruce was hard, his skin wet and gleaming and warm, his hard fisted tight around that thick, gorgeous cock, that he was jacking himself off in slow, steady strokes— Clark knew that, had the briefest flash of that impression, water sluicing down a body, the reverb of a bitten-off groan, the slap of skin-on-skin, before he tore his senses away, and it made him hard too, made blood rush down and made his cock thicken with want, and that was—

inconvenient.

It was damned inconvenient, is all.

* * *

So maybe what happened was inevitable.

Clark heard Bruce’s heartbeat accelerate, heard the shot of the grapple gun fire, and a choked cry as—Robin? Cried out in pain, and took to the air in a blur of movement. The beep of the League communicator in his ear, then, almost knocked him out of the air, he was so shocked.

“Superman,” he said, catching his breath and righting himself.

“Get over here,” Batman growled, and flipped the channel off, and within the next second, Clark was diving off a building roof with Bruce, arcing through the air along the parabolic curve of the decel line in perfect coordination. 

Bruce landed on the adjacent rooftop and shot him a glance.

“What?” Clark asked, painfully self-conscious. Be cool, dumbass. Be cool. “What—do I have something on my face?”

“You’re early.”

 _Damn_. Clark shrugged. “Thanks,” he said, wilfully misunderstanding. “What’s up?”

Bruce pointed in the air. Something bright red and flat was pulsing, suspended in the air, like a boomtube, opened directly into hell. “That,” he said. 

Flash crackled to a stop beside them. “Ominous,” Barry murmured. There was a faint green glow in the air, as Hal pulled up in a giant, green flying pirate ship. “What is it?”

Wonder Woman. Cyborg. Zatanna. Batgirl. All of them, one by one, lining up in the dark, like sentinels. The portal had begun to hiss and spit lines of angry red sparks along its edges.

When Bruce replied, his voice was the low, dark scrape of Gotham’s Bat. It shouldn’t have been hot, but, well. 

“We’re about to find out.”

* * *

So they dealt with the bad guy—a sorcerer with delusions of grandeur, what else was new—and patched up their scrapes and took off for home at dawn, except Bruce narrowed his eyes at Clark the second they were alone, and said, “You were early, today.”

Clark tried for a smile. Like a dog with a bone, he was. “Better than late, right?”

“You shaved off a second from your standard arrival time,” Bruce replied evenly. “You were already on your way to Gotham, before I called. What did you know that I didn’t.”

“Um.” Oh god. Oh god. He knew. _Did_ he know? How _much_ did he know???! 

This was _bad_.

“Talk.”

“I—heard something. I don’t know. It was—my head’s weird, Bruce. It was really just a feeling.”

“You heard something.” He paused. The sun was rising in the east, behind him, casting his face in shadow, limning the edges of the cowl in gold. They were on the rooftop of an office building in downtown Gotham, except even here, in the commercial center of town, the buildings were full of spires and gargoyles and stucco facades. “What did you hear.”

Bruce’s eyes were resting on him, and it was—difficult, being the sole object of all that enormous focus. Clark couldn't—he realized he couldn't really…. think. “Your heart,” he said softly. “I—I heard your heartbeat.”

Bruce’s face was. Granite. Marble. Something along those lines, something hard and unmoving and—you know. Metaphors.

But his heart. Stuttered.

“I see,” Bruce said, after a beat.

“Do you.” Clark’s hands were closed, tight fists. There was guilt bubbling thick in his stomach. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want—It wasn’t my inten—God. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. I’m sure you are.”

The grapple gun fired, and when Clark opened his eyes, Bruce was gone.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! if you liked it, remember to hit kudos <3  
> for more me, find me on tumblr @pasdecoeur.


End file.
